“I’ve washed it all off!” said she naively, lifting her face to his scrutiny.  “It’s not an improvement by daylight, you know.”

He smiled a little, but he did not release her hands.  “Elfrida, you must come home.”

“Let us sit down,” she said, drawing them away.  He had a trifle too much advantage, standing so close to her, tall and firm in the dusk, knowing what he wanted, and with that tenderness in his voice.  Not that she had the most far-away intention of yielding, but she did not want their little farce to be spoiled by any complications that might mar her pleasure in looking back upon it.  “I think,” said she, “you will find that a comfortable chair,” and she showed him one which stood where all the daylight that came through the torn curtains concentrated itself.  From her own seat she could draw her face into the deepest shadow in the room.  She made the arrangement almost instinctively, and the lines of intensity the last week had drawn upon Cardiffs face were her first reward.

“I have come to ask you to give up this thing,” he said.

Elfrida leaned forward a little in her favorite attitude, clasping her knee.  Her eyes were widely serious.  “You ask me to give it up?” she repeated slowly.  “But why do you ask me?”

“Because I cannot associate it with you—­to me it is impossible that you should do it.”

Elfrida lifted her eyebrows a little.  “Do you know why I am doing it?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“It is not a mere escapade, you understand.  And these people do not pay me anything.  That is quite just, because I have never learned to act and I haven’t much voice.  I can take no part, only just—­appear.”

“Appear!” Cardiff exclaimed.  “Have you appeared!”

“Seven times,” Elfrida said simply, but she felt that she was blushing.

Cardiff’s anger rose up hotly within him, and strove with his love, and out of it there came a sickening sense of impotency which assailed his very soul.  All his life he had had tangibilities to deal with.  This was something in the air, and already he felt the apprehension of being baffled here, where he wrought for his heart and his future.

“So that is a part of it,” he said, with tightened lips.  “I did not know.”

“Oh, I insisted upon that,” Elfrida replied softly.  “I am quite one of them—­one of the young ladies of the Peach Blossom Company.  I am learning all their sensations, their little frailties, their vocabulary, their ways of looking at things.  I know how the novice feels when she makes her first appearance in the chorus of a spectacle—­I’ve noted every vibration of her nerves.  I’m learning all the little jealousies and intrigues among them, and all their histories and their ambitions.  They are more moral than you may think, but it is not the moral one who is the most interesting.  Her virtue is generally a very threadbare, common sort of thing.  The—­others—­have